


thine heart full of spring

by oriflamme



Series: the bitter and rooted love [2]
Category: Hollow Knight (Video Game)
Genre: Arachnophobia, Body Horror, Dissociation, Gen, Nightmares, Panic Attacks, Post-Game(s), What's A God To A Knight Of Void?, What's A King To A God?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-07
Updated: 2018-10-07
Packaged: 2019-07-27 16:51:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,457
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16223291
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oriflamme/pseuds/oriflamme
Summary: (The gods are no longer at strife.The Void need spread no plague to usurp the kingdom.The people stare with blank, empty eyes, without thought, without memory, as the dark swallows the world.)





	thine heart full of spring

(The gods are no longer at strife.

The Void need spread no plague to usurp the kingdom.

The people stare with blank, empty eyes, without thought, without memory, as the dark swallows the world.)

-

It stumbles upon her by simple dint of the fact that she waits outside the temple for another.

She was there, it remembers, though the memories are searing, broken shards that it struggles to piece together. A bright red swirl of cloak - a darting, clever needle - a silken thread, strong enough to hold it in place as its sibling struck true.

She more closely resembles their father than it does, all of her shell pale as ash. Her berry-black, faceted eyes flash with defiance in the dark as she tosses her head and draws her needle to face it. There is no void inside her carapace, no sibling-shade.

Hornet.

It staggers. It cannot help it; its legs are intact, unlike the ruin of its left arm and torso, but it hasn’t walked in an age. A draft soughs through its insides, within the hollow space where radiant cysts pulsed, and all of its honed poise is gone. The stinging burns where the cysts drained and the cauterized, twisted wreckage of its shoulder cannot compare to the bitter, piercing agony of the emotions it shouldn’t have. The cysts are gone; the cancer remains.

It could fall upon its nail, now. The Radiance would not absorb the blow this time. 

Or perhaps the Pale King’s daughter will break its neck, as the King no longer can. Her claws are chipped and scuffed from a life of survival, where the King’s were polished and full of grace, but the strength would be the same. It is, after all, a worthless, wretched thing. A broken tool, fit only to be discarded. It lurches to a woozy stop and rests its weight upon its nail. Belatedly, it recalls its lean, looming height; it bends its stiff neck so that she can reach, torso cramping as it stoops, and waits.

She takes it as a feint. Casting her needle forth, the Hornet darts away, eyes narrowed, and then lances back, slamming her foot into its chest to knock it down. The shattered chains looped through its faded pauldrons clatter as it crumples backward, her needle-point at its throat.

When she cocks her head to the side, wide horns canted just so, it cannot breathe. It tilts its head back when she does not move, fleetingly aware that the carapace of its neck cracked with the molten heat of the Radiance’s voice. Its own voice was never more than a faint huff of air, the one part of it that truly fulfilled the Pale King’s purpose.

Now, it does not recognize the rasping whimper that clicks in its throat, or the wheeze of air in its chest cavity as it trembles. The urge to clamp down, to crack open its own wrist if that’s what it takes to stop the unforgivable failure of its control, makes its remaining hand spasm.  

The chains slither free as the Hornet retracts her needle and vaults down from its chest.

When it does not move, frozen, she raps the needle against a stone, impatient. The spark makes it flinch; uncertain, it rises to its feet.

“Well?” she demands, voice sharp and humming with life. “Are you coming?”

It inclines its head. 

Where she walks, it follows.

-

It does not understand, at first, what the Void ascendant means. It never visited the kingdom; it knew the abyss of its birthplace, and the White Palace, and the temple, and nothing more. The golden veins and abscesses of plague that spread from the sealed egg wither, hanging from the walls like shrouds. The mad sickness in the air has died.

So have the lumaflies. 

Slowly, like a creeping dread, darkness unfurls through Hallownest. The Hornet glances back at it once or twice, eyes narrow with suspicion – but though the echo of the Pale King’s disapproval makes its insides roil with nausea, it can only stare back in confusion. Soon, the Hornet draws her needle and uses it to feel out the hall ahead of her, muttering to herself as the ambient light of the kingdom fades around them.

It has no trouble seeing in the dark. It was born in the abyss, molded by the dark, and after centuries of staring into the heart of burning, radiant light, the gloom of the dead kingdom is a balm for its hollow eyes. 

It takes longer than it should to realize that it is wrong for these tunnels to feel so much like _home_. 

-

Grimly, the Hornet races up. 

It climbs after her, slower than it likes. In narrow places it needs to crouch or crawl. When she darts up the shaft of a well, nimble claws launching her from one smooth wall to the next, it cannot summon its old strength and agility to do the same. After a few pathetic attempts, she huffs sharply at the top and kicks down a chain for it to climb.

She has not the King’s dignified composure; she is stern and impatient and bristling. It is simply her nature. Still, it cringes every time.

They ascend into a village already half-way gone. The Radiance’s grasping sickness did not reach this place, but the Void has. An elderly bug kneels by a wrought-iron bench, his craggy face slack and far away. In one of the shops, a bug slumps at her counter, unable to speak except in broken, sluggish syllables; a beetle slumbers in the back, his breath shallow as his dreams deepen into a coma. Wind skims the void between houses, a forlorn note. The Hornet darts from door to door, increasingly agitated, but finds only another shop empty and the rest still, and too quiet. 

They will not wake.

It cannot keep up with her pace – it catches up when she comes to a stop in the village square, and waits. It moves to clasp the claws of both hands around the hilt of its battered nail, and finds itself at a loss. It trained to be ambidextrous – perfect in every way – but the left was the one that it favored.

It lacks an arm. It lacks a title. It is not sure what purpose, if any, the Hornet intends for it. 

A sibling’s hollow shell lies abandoned on the ground, the ink of its substance slowly rising into the air as a fine mist. Thick clots of darkness stain the earth. When it recognized the final sibling in the temple, it realized that others must have left the abyss - further proof that the King’s seals failed. But wherever they may have wandered in the long years since, this one came to the village and became an explosive seed of something more.

(When its sibling summoned the Void, it summoned _all_. They ate the light, and drowned their dreams in atrament.

Somehow, it is still here.)

The Pale King hollowed out his children and remade them with Root and Wyrm and Void, to cure and contain the infection and save his kingdom. Yet they’re still dying. The emptiness in their minds will kill them as surely as the Radiance.

The Hornet turns the lash of her tongue upon it, demanding answers. But it cannot speak. What it suspects – what it senses in the air around them, that hollow not-hunger that used to lie so patiently beneath the abyss - is little more than intuition. Even if it could respond, it would not have the words to explain. 

It does not know how to undo what the Void Knight has done. 

Her strident censure frightens it, badly. The fury of royal blood is exactly what it deserves, though it introduces a unique, piercing pain in its chest to hear it in the Hornet’s tones rather than the Pale King’s. The King would not have shouted, it thinks. He would have killed it (and faltered for an instant, drained by the realization of yet another failure; would have rested a claw on his study desk under the weight of the burden, and then lifted his chin with regal calm to step over the repulsive refuse on the floor) with only a quiet sigh. It falls back from the Hornet, flinching, and lets its nail drop with a _clang_ as it clutches the hollow, dry grooves and ridges of its ruined carapace. It digs its claws in and the pain is a distant anchor, a reminder not to flinch again while it lets her words wash over it from very far away.

It snaps back to awareness when she shakes its shoulders. At some point, it offered its neck to her again; her hands find its shoulders and their tarnished armor instead. She stares at its face for a long moment, brow furrowed, and it stares back, frozen. Such direct eye contact would earn the King’s tight-eyed frown; yet looking away now, an admission of awareness, would be worse.

It almost jolts again when she lets go and steps back from it, her claws curled in hesitation. “Can you hear me?” she says, as though this is in question. It dips its head a stiff fraction, its whole body painfully rigid. All emotions are abhorrent, but the mortification is inextricably twined with the King’s disapproval in its mind.  

“Good.” For a moment, the Hornet hesitates again. She stabbed her needle into the dirt to free her hands; now she yanks it free, slings it across her back, and hovers. Waiting.

Slowly, it reaches down to retrieve its nail. Something leaks under the armor and tattered cloth over its shoulder, where it has torn open the shell. 

-

It drifts after her, each step shocky and jolting. She riffles through three different houses, the air clogged with dust, and finally emerges with a long bolt of soft grey cloth. After a few incomprehensible attempts to communicate with it through gestures, she tells it aloud to remove its moldering old cloak. The white has long gone green-black with age; it shrugs the garment off, along with the useless armor, and with a smaller needle the Hornet adjusts the new cloth until it wraps around its disfigured carapace to the knees. She tugs on the ends until it hangs evenly, then glances at its face as though looking for input. She frowns at the thin trickle of black liquid that oozes from its gouged carapace, and seals the wound with liquid silk from a sealed jar.

When she is satisfied, they descend.

The murk deepens. It is unsure what the Hornet seeks. Perhaps, like her father, she wishes to save the people afflicted above. 

But she attempts to approach the temple of the black egg, before anything else. And that –

-

(- is a mistake.)

-

There is no light left in these halls. The markers and seals do not shine when they pass; the lumaflies lay cold. The brittle bodies of the long-infected inhabitants of the kingdom crunch underfoot, their minds and soft internals long since eaten away by the plague cysts. They are finally at rest.

But this is not a quiet place. 

( _Our voices will cry out again_. An abyssal shriek, a not-sound that rings in its skull. Two thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine hollow children, sacrificed to the pit.

It is not sure who told the Pale King that the Void was without mind or will. For it is **ravenous.** )

At first, the Hornet leads. Her resolve firm, she uses her needle to guide her: she marks the path they’ve taken with a spool of thread, then grits her mandibles and makes the first leaps blind. It lopes after her, able to sense the exact dimensions of the caves and passages around them long after the darkness is complete.

It realizes when the blade-sharp thorns underfoot shift, replaced by something else. Black tendrils with longer thorns, that pass too easily through the carapace and sink into the soul.

And the Hornet cannot sense them. They are intangible under the needle's metal. She leaps, and it is not enough; she aims for a platform that _should_ be clear but is not.

It lunges. Its old speed wracks its body with a bolt of agony – it casts its nail aside and catches her from behind. She cries out in alarm, and the sound does not echo nearly as much as it should in caverns this size. With its longer legs, it lands clear of the tendrils, but stumbles; the next step lands square on one of the cold thorns. 

Like recognizes like. It is as much a part of the shadows as the tendrils themselves. It raises its foot, gingerly, and can detect no puncture wound in its sole. 

The Hornet demands to be put down. It obeys, carefully setting her in a clear space, and she investigates the platform with a closer frown when her needle sweeps through nothing at all. It takes true willpower to refrain from holding her back when she reaches out and carefully feels out the shape of the tendrils with her claws. She yanks her hand back with a shudder and a hiss of pain. Her segmented palm sizzles a little, but is otherwise unharmed by the cold burn of the Void. 

She is a child of the Wyrm. More so than it ever was, born of three divine essences. 

With more caution, she gestures for it to guide her through the pitch black. After a moment’s consideration – cringing at its presumption – it scoops her up and picks its way through the thorny path. She folds her arms with a huff of displeasure, but allows it. 

But there is no way to approach the temple now. Its progress slows to a crawl as they near the final junction. The walls and floor and ceiling vanish even to its senses; it pushes forward, as blind as she has been, but the darkness is oppressively thick. It steps on the thorns and tendrils, unable to avoid them as they enter the new home of the Void. 

Of the sibling it left behind, in the dark.

Its body feels numb. It’s not sure it still has a shell at all. A throbbing note reverberates in its skull, a scream that lasts longer than a breath should, and it cannot feel the Hornet in the crook of its arm. The Void draws it on; it cannot stop walking forward. There is no boundary left between it and the Void, it is liquid and formless and melting again and all the air is liquid as well, and it _cannot breathe –_

It steps on another thorn, longer than the others. 

A blinding white pain erupts behind its hollow eyes, and it convulses, and screams. 

-

It awakens far from the temple. 

It is surprised to have awakened at all. When the Void Knight summoned all of the Void to consume the Radiance, it shouldn’t have been able to walk away, separate, discrete. That other failed vessel burst its shell to rejoin its kindred; it does not know why it hasn’t done the same. 

The world is very green, here – deep and rich, and full of life. It rests on a floor of cool tiles where soft moss grows in between the stones. Its right leg buzzes with numb static, but it recognizes the vines and blossoms that drape over the ornate metal of the greenhouse.

It knew her absence in the White Palace. It knew the lack by the silvering leaves, and the waning branches that held the Palace aloft. It knew the Pale King’s quiet mourning.

She is _here_. Her presence fills the world with sweet shining dew.

The Hornet appears in its line of sight. The light patter of her feet on the stone should have alerted it; it startles, and the tiny flinch sends a jolt of pain through its leg. She bears faint, fresh marks upon her mask and her legs – cold burns where she wrenched them free of the thorns with the guiding line of silk.

“Do not move,” she scolds, kneeling beside it. She nudges its nail beside it, and touches the crack in its head, then its shoulder, before shifting to inspect the foot that exploded with such pain. 

When it looks down, it stiffens and stares at the pale roots growing out of its foot, sinking deep into the earth. 

“Mostly Void,” she murmurs, “and Wyrm in form. But that last pierced to the very Root of you.” 

The look the Hornet shoots at it is very odd indeed. All it can do is stare back in turn, wishing it did not understand. 

(It hoped that its failure was simply a matter of weakness on its part. That it could force itself to be the sacrifice the Pale King wanted. If it pared itself down ruthlessly, if it trained to the brink of collapse, if it became a perfect Vessel, then maybe he would -

But it was never what he wanted.) 

 -

It attempts to pry its foot free twice before the Hornet whaps its claw away with the flat of her needle. The admonishment is like the slap of ice, and it curls there, miserable, until the roots at last retract into its carapace. It contorts its limbs to peer at the sole, but can see no trace of the pale root, or any crack. The wound was not a physical one. 

The Hornet leaves for a long stretch of time, and returns grimmer. "The Void spreads," she reports, to its blank stare. The perfect stillness and emotionless deference that the King sought in it only seem to unsettle her. She shifts her weight, the earthlight of the garden reflected in her eyes, and then reaches for it. It freezes, hyperaware of the raspy wheeze quickening in its throat - but she pats the back of its hand awkwardly, with a contrite dip of her horns. "We must go. There may be a being here we might consult."

There is. It is a fact, much as it was a fact that the King and his acolytes were perfectly attuned. But the Hornet does not seem to sense the presence. Though she traverses the passages of the garden with familiar ease, she slows before a shade gate. Concentrated void writhes across the path, empty faces and grasping claws writhing beneath the surface, bound only by sealed metal. The Hornet strikes at it exactly once, her expression already resigned. The gate flares, bubbling with white and black lightning, and she's forced to leap back twice to escape the backlash.

It is familiar with the mechanism, at least. It walks past the Hornet, bends, and claws into the dirt until it finds the underside of the control unit, and traces the Pale King's insignia. 

The gate cuts out with the flick of a switch.

The Hornet smacks her face.

-

It knows the soft glow of the branching roots that escape the cocoon.

It does not know the dead, long-dry shell of the bug who fell in defense of she who lies within. "Fierce Dryya, of the Great Knights," the Hornet says. 

They enter. It needs to crawl all the way through the narrow, winding confines, flat on its stomach. The Hornet waits for it at the end of each long stretch, but stops abruptly at the end. 

The White Lady bears a crown of pale branches; her roots delve through the cocoon to reach the earth below. Her angular eyes are a brilliant, startling blue, like a sky it has never seen, and just as clouded. She is bound, wrapped more tightly than the Pale King's sharp wings ever were. 

“Oh?” she says, stirring. Then, when it extracts itself from the passage and rises to its knees - she stills. Her crown has grown too thoroughly through the cocoon. She cannot move, but her voice is low and sweet. “Oh. Oh, my children. Do they seek my aid?”

The Hornet looks sharply away. "We cannot choose our mothers," she says. An apology.

The White Lady's gaze is achingly kind. "My beloved Wyrm bargained truly, with my knowledge and assent. Forgive me my trespass; in my seclusion, I fear that I have taken liberties in thinking affectionately of you as a daughter not of my line. Thousands of our children were born, and hollowed, and used up. 'No cost too great,' no sacrifice too much - and for love of him and his kingdom, I set aside my shame, and my regrets."

Then her sightless gaze turns inexorably toward it, and it stills in turn. "I can sense you, child. Would that my Wyrm had brought you to me before the time of reckoning. You were nothing but love. It was ill-judged."

A nail through its gut would hurt less than this. It left its nail outside the narrow constraints of the cocoon; it cannot excise itself from the White Lady's pitying stare. 

It does not know what it expected to find. It clutches its torso, full of hollow, crawling pain, and wants to keen. It wants, it feels, and it _is not wanted_.

("The usurper was never proud of you," the Radiance said, absently. The Radiance said many things, her molten words seeping into the cracks in their minds, her burning light coruscating behind their eyes. "One cannot be proud of an object.")

A swirl of red, in the corner of its vision. The Hornet raises her chin, her slim carapace set between it and the White Lady. It does not know why she has drawn her needle; the White Lady cannot see well enough to perceive it. "I thought that the new Vessel was strong enough to do it. To face the heart of our infection, and transcend it. But something has gone wrong. The Void consumes their minds." She shakes her head - she is trembling with something that isn't fear. "How many sacrifices? Where does it end?"

And the White Lady sighs. "There, I had hoped," she says, voice barely more than a whisper. It cannot bear to hear her. "The little one who came before me seemed a perfect Vessel - hollowed by the abyss, and once more by travelling the blasted, howling plains above. A Vessel could not simply be formulated to extinguish the Radiance; it needed to contain the concentrated Void within itself, after. Though the Void was worshipped by the ancient Imperium, it seemed content to remain buried after they destroyed themselves - the diffuse nature of its divine substance in the wind over the plains merely a consequence of the Imperium's fall."

"It is not contained now." The Hornet shakes her head. "There must be a power to counter it. If you were unbound, Lady -"

"- I should become a plague of my own," the Lady interrupts, gently. "I would be a Queen again, terrible and lovely, and there would be no power left in Hallownest to counter _me_ as my seeds ran rampant. There already was a power to counter the Void - a Radiant light. But the balance between higher beings was destroyed long ago, and in our struggle to be remembered, to usurp each other's prerogative, we have made a ruin of this world."

"Then what must we _do_?" the Hornet demands. Her voice cracks like a needle rapping on stone.

A susurrus, as the White Lady's branches expand in a shrug. "If the Void Knight is truly emptiness ascendant, begetting only silence and despair, then nothing _can_ be done. But if it is not - if it has the will - perhaps here, at the end of all things, you can save something else."

Then - "Please, my child. Do not weep so. Come here. I am afraid I cannot see your face any longer, but you feel so clear."

It cannot - it cannot - 

Black liquid rolls down its mask. Stumbling, halting, (the Hornet puts out a claw and says, "You do not need to -" as though it could ever turn away) it kneels at the pale roots of the White Lady. Its new cloak, it thinks, from a long way away, is the same silver of the leaves in the Palace.

"And now, I cannot hold you," she says. "So cruel is the world. I felt you weaken, and thought nothing would remain."

A pale root shifts, and presses against its cheek.

"When you choose," the White Lady murmurs, "choose well. The roots must run deep."

-

When they leave the Queen's Garden, Void streams up the walls. Liquid, overflowing in reverse. Outside the White Lady's domain, there is nothing to stem the swallowing tide.

It cannot concentrate. Its head feels heavy, sluggish, cried dry. It aches for the days when all it required was pure, cutting clarity of purpose. The clean, hollow shell of perfection that it honed for the Pale King. Now it is shattered, mutilated and thick with the fog of emotion it can no longer repress.

The Hornet does not notice the moment it slows. She blinks and whirls around, however, when it folds its long legs and sinks to the ground. Impatience flickers in her face; then, with visible effort, she softens her expression and averts her stare. She stalks back to it with quick, mincing steps, and sits beside it. She sits like someone on the verge of darting away, her legs arranged so she can immediately roll back to her feet. 

It has only silence. After a few minutes, it scrapes its claws down its mask, scratching at the bitter, cold stains left by leaking void. 

"I felt only pity for your cursed kind. Like ghosts," the Hornet says. She draws her knees up under her red cloak, hugging one with an arm. "But no one has ever truly left here. Travelers who abandon Hallownest wander the blasted plains, and return again with no memory. They piece together what little they have left, and tell themselves that they came from other kingdoms, other villages. The people whose names they recall are usually dead, regardless. Once this place falls dark, is that the end? What will remain but our ruins and our ghosts, and no one to know them?" 

(Less than. 

There will be no ghosts when the Void is done.

The howling cliffs yawn above, the wind eroding stone and mind. Another aspect of the god that _always_ wins.)

The Hornet rests her chin upon her knee, eyes slitted as she stares broodingly at the dark before them. "Does it unite all the Void? There must be a way to reach it."

When she rises, it should follow.

It cannot seem to summon the strength. At first she gestures, with a stern frown. She grows impatient when it merely lifts its head to stare at her, dully. "Are you coming?" 

It shakes its head. 

The Hornet stamps her foot and strikes her needle on the wall. The Void swallows the sound. "Enough! Stand and fight! Would you give in now? Or are you so weak that this is where you would end?" 

The driving sound of her voice almost stings it to its feet. Almost. It feels every year of its age, exhausted. Better it fade away here, now.

"Fine," she snaps, when it hangs its head. She whips around with a sharp click. "I will do it my - self."

Her voice flattens so abruptly that it does not understand what changed. It can't seem to stop drifting, its head so heavy -

Then it lifts its head - and sees the creature that hangs upside down from the ceiling, its six-fold eyes level with the Hornet's frozen face. It lacks a thorax, but hangs from three extra sets of limbs, the fourth pair spread wide. A heavy cloth veil covers its horns but falls loose on either side of its inverted mask, revealing a pair of monstrous chelicerae.

"…Mother?" the Hornet says.

" **You let me die, daughter** ," the Beast says.

Then she lunges, and latches her jaws around the Hornet's face.

Horror jolts it wide awake. The Hornet screams, the sound muffled by her mother's bulk as the arachnid drops onto her. It scrambles toward them, nail in hand, even as the Hornet frees her pinned needle and starts to stab wildly into the Beast's abdomen.

" **It failed.** "

It stops dead. 

It turns, the voice of the Hornet fading as it stares at the crown of thorns.

The Pale King hovers before him, resplendent in his grace. No smooth mask, no pale wrappings now to shield his arching, translucent wings - the thin membrane crystalline, the vanes so dark an obsidian that it only enhances the sharp purity of the King's paneled armor and carapace. The King's Brand shines in the hollow of his throat, a beacon in the dark. No longer waning, no longer faded, but in his luminous prime.

He grasps its chin with sharp, slender claws, and is not careful as he jerks its face up for inspection. The whimper of its throat sounds wet and pathetic; it half-raises its own hand before it catches itself with a flinch of humiliation, a sickening lurch. It should not have moved - he will _know_ -

He already knows. The Pale King looks down at it with cool disdain. " **Worthless. It was always inadequate for its purpose** ," he says, as though commenting upon it in idle conversation. The castigation pierces it with agony. His hand rests on its neck, and it trembles so hard that it thinks it should shatter of its own accord. Another repulsive gurgle of hateful noise escapes it, and its traitorous hand grazes the side of the King's claw - reaching, pleading, entreating. 

More than any pity of the White Lady's, it wanted the Pale King's love.

" **A disappointment.** " The Pale King's mouth twists with disgust. " **Such a detestable thing, tainted and craven in its impulses. It would have been better if it were never born.** "

Then he drives the claws of his free hand into its stomach, through the seal of binding he carved into it so long ago. It doubles up in shuddering agony, legs kicking and spasming beneath it. Ink spills out around the Pale King's hand as the shell crunches and cracks. Its claw finds the Pale King's wrist, but it cannot bring itself to do more than clutch his arm and shake its head, the sounds in its cratered chest wretched as it bleeds in wrenching pulses. But it is not - it is not -

\- it is not him.

It forces its gaze up from the horror of its torso to stare the Void in the King in its hollow, empty eyes. 

This is not real. This is not the judgement it fears and craves. Not a memory, but a captive fear. A nightmare. 

It does not know when they fell asleep. But they need to wake. The Hornet is real and true, but still beset by the nightmare of her mother, and if they do not break free it does not think they will survive what comes. It scrabbles at the Pale King's claw in earnest ( _it is not him_ , _it is not him_ ) and then shoves at his chest with force that would've shattered the shell of a lesser bug _(it is not him, it is not him_ ) _._ The barbs of his knuckles hook into its carapace as it tries to tear itself away. 

But no matter how it reaches, it cannot find its nail.

The Void watches it thrash with a faint smile. 

It does not have a voice. Not here, not of its body.

But it knows _a_ voice. Let the memory be enough.

It closes its eyes, and lets its throat burn. 

"Enemy," the Radiance says, like a bell.

The barbed hooks of the Pale King's hands rip out of its carapace, and the Void snarls.

(Black and gold shards of memory - the rippling curve of the egg's inner shell - a molten light that watches through its eyes, and recognizes the small, pale figure before them for what it is.)

"Ancient enemy," the old light says, the whisper as absolute as the shout. "You will not consume me."

The Void explodes out of the Pale King's husk, and the whole world goes black. Eight bright, white eyes open in the center of a writhing face, staring right through it like it isn't even there. The King's Brand remains, crackling white in the center of the Void Knight's forehead.

It cocks its head to the side, and smiles.

**Already. Done.**

(The Void has always been patient, because the Void has already won.)

It eats the memory of the Radiance's voice right out of it, effortlessly. The abyss below wells with silent, sobbing screams. The Void hungers even now, not satisfied with the Radiance, or the dead, or the dreams. It cannot feel its body anymore.

With a sharp cry, the Hornet springs up, kicks off its shoulder, and throws her needle at the Void like a spear. Then, without waiting to see it strike home, she -

-

\- slaps it awake.

It startles, hand shooting out to hit the walls, to feel the lean shell of its legs, to make sure its carapace has not dissolved into nothing. Before the alarm fades from its chest, the Hornet presses her palm against the side of its face she slapped. "You're awake now. I'm sorry."

They did not make it more than a few steps beyond the edge of the Queen's Garden. 

"It fixated upon you," the Hornet says, as it tests its trembling legs. "Its new focus is a strength as well as a weakness. When you spoke, it withdrew from me and I was able to act."

Her gaze is searching. Perhaps expecting it to speak now. Perhaps wary of how much of the radiant infection lingers. If even that fleeting, fragmented memory is enough for the divine being to have survived.

It shakes its head. If some small part of the Radiance lived, it does no longer.

But it thinks that something else does. 

-

The Void clears their path.

The ink coats every surface, and remolds the run-down, overgrown passages of the old kingdom into something older still: the floor a shining black that looks liquid, but feels solid underfoot; the walls and pillars fluted for ink to flow up through, with Void imprinted on the surface of dark, coiled shells. Sharp spires form angular archways over passageways that used to be too short for it to stand up straight. Frozen tendrils of darkness form bridges over canyons and pools of black, lightless water, the twining whorls shifting into new patterns when the Hornet looks away. The Hornet mutters that this is not the most direct path, but the Void smooths over any junctions or side passages to form a single, unbroken hall. 

The bodies have vanished. 

They are awaited in its new home. 

The Hornet seems to have no other plan than to confront the Void in its temple. Or at least, she does not expound upon her thoughts aloud. Instead, she walks by its side - her quicker stride sometimes outpaces its careful, longer legs, but she visibly checks herself and waits until it catches up. She will not let it follow after her, which upsets it. Measuring its pace to remain a step behind is so habitual a thing that it feels out of sorts, unsure where to look or position its lone hand. It holds its pure nail before its chest for a time, head bowed, and that helps. An old, safe stance. The needle never leaves the Hornet's hand.

"It is nothing here," she says, the sound of a tight smile in her voice. "We might as well try to cut a shadow's throat."

If they succumb to sleep again, they may not wake up. 

But for them, there is no other way into dream. The Void Knight mastered the art, before its ascension.

Two vast, towering new statues flank either side of the black egg. Both are the same strange, hauntingly unfamiliar species of beetle, ponderous, the exoskeleton of their arms drawn frighteningly tight. The one on the right holds forth a wide bowl, a vessel for the liquid Void to pour up into, its other set of arms pressed to the ground in obeisance. The one on the left raises its arms out to either side, its bowl balanced on its second pair of claws, its head tilted back in a carved scream. Dark motes of Void bob in the air, thicker than a mist, rising up from the smooth surface of a black lake.

"Tch. Redecorating," the Hornet says, with a dark, scornful click.

It lets its nail fall from its formal stance, and the Hornet grimly unspools a length of silk.

This time, they barely take a single step over the threshold before they both drop.

-

\- and wake up.

For a moment, as it tumbles, it catches a glimpse of a warm, dawning firmament, the clouds honey-touched from one horizon to the other.

Then it slams into a platform. Dazed for a moment, its head wavers over the edge of the platform, and it sees the darkness writhing below. 

So many eyes, staring up at it from the abyss. Thousands of siblings, their shades merging into one sprawling, roiling form as the Void blots out the sky. The Hornet staggers to her feet on another platform, too far to reach in a single bound. 

(It remembers being here.

It remembers joining the host, drawn under a single purpose. Every failure, every shade that ever found a Vessel, every child of Root and Wyrm and Void sacrificed in the pit - reaching out and holding the Radiance in place as the Void drowned its light at last.

(And then _nothing_ , a blissful blank in its mind, as the Void continued to rise, as the sucking vacuum left by the death of a god drew them all in, all the Void in the world unifying with a single hunger.))

The will is overwhelming. It wants to shatter this useless form, as crippled here as in the physical realm, and rejoin the whole. Let the Void swallow all its terror, all its love, and savor the memories as something to slake the endless hunger. 

It cannot. Will not. 

Across the void, the Hornet dives forward, her needle bright with pale light. "Listen to me!" she shouts. The shining thread must catch upon something in the Void Knight - she swings from it, darting from one shadow claw to the next as she aims her needle at the Void's face. "Ghost of Hallownest, you must stop this! You must regain control!"

They see no reason to listen. Once Hallownest is empty, they will scream their pain to the howling wind, and let themselves be buried. Sediment will roll over them, and new gods will come to fill the Void, oblivious to what came before. The minds and dreams of those who remain are an afterthought - the true meal was that of all the Radiance's plague-riddled, hoarded souls. Soon, all of them will be here together, and - 

It jerks its thoughts free. 

But it has seen what it needed to.

The Void swats the Hornet away with a single claw. She hits hard, but rolls back to her feet. Knotting another line of silk with her mandibles, she launches once more, one arm limp by her side. She darts and whips through the air, slashing, calling out the title she gave it long ago. She weaves through the endless sky without needing the wings she must have, until the air around the Void's crown gleams with web - and then she ties herself to it and drives directly at its face. The needle flares as she stabs it into the burning Brand.

The blow actually hits. The Void bares ebon teeth, but the Hornet stings again and again, without pause.

And it thinks that, given time and enough openings, she might succeed in shattering the Void's focal point. The head and crown of horns, two taller than the rest, are the most defined aspects of the Void Knight. Even now, her throat shines like a star, in recognizance of a King. The Void will decohere, the focus and will lost, the shades unaligned, all of its essence scattered once more. With luck, most of it will sink back into the depths of the earth as a forgotten sea.

But it cannot let that happen.

It recalls its old white armor, and leaps. 

And falls. 

The Void has an ocean of nothing to call upon. But even cloaked in white and silver, it is also of the Void. There is nothing left of the Radiance to make it think otherwise. It falls into the inky darkness, and keeps falling. Tendrils with black thorns brush past it on their way up to counter the Hornet. It falls further still.

The Void does not realize the danger until it raises its arm, and plunges its pure nail into -

-

\- the floor of the temple.

The nail is not enough. The lance-like roots it sends shooting through the floor are. The shell of the black egg creaks - and shatters.

The lake of Void bursts through, pouring in a torrent through the channels of Hallownest.

-

**NO.**

The Void hits it with a sickening crunch. It slams into the Hornet in mid-swing - or she intercepts it, deliberately, but the force of the blow sends them both flying again. 

But the nature of the world has already shifted. The Void howls, an absence of sound that makes its horn crack a little further, makes Hornet's attempt to lasso a platform fall short as she screams. A whirlpool swirls in the ocean of the abyss as the Void pours inexorably downward. Falling back into the abyss. 

That's not enough. The Hornet recovers and hastily prepares her needle for another attempt, but it stops her, wrapping its arm around her to stay her arm as they plummet down after it. She shouts at it, the words incomprehensible noise under the Void's reverberating not-howl of fury and fear. 

They hit the firmament, at the edge of the fissure it has torn in the dream. A fall from that height should have broken their carapaces - but this is not a physical place. Still, when it uncurls from around the Hornet and rises, it walks to the edge of the chasm with unsteady steps.

It drops to its knees and thrusts its hand into the rushing well of Void. For a cold moment, it cannot feel its arm. 

It reaches deeper -

-

\- and catches a small, dark hand, before the cascading Void washes it down the hole in the floor. 

Its sibling never grew up, the way it did. 

-

"Won't let you fall now," it rasps. The memory is there, visceral, as much a part of the coursing tide as the screams of the falling and the hollow crunch of the dead. 

No one with a will and a focus strong enough to unify all of the Void could be a blank slate. The Pale King never understood.

The rushing Void tries to draw them both down. It cannot tell within the absolute darkness if its sibling is struggling; it can only feel that soft-shelled claw, threatening to tear out of its grip at any moment, or drag it down into the drowning depths with its weight.

The Hornet skids to a stop beside it, silk looped around her waist and needle lodged firmly in a platform above as an anchor. Her shell sizzles as she plunges her hands in, reaching, to find their sibling's other hand. "You won't die here!" she shouts, and that memory is there, too - the cast-off shell of the ashen Wyrm; the white egg from which the Pale King arose; the King's Brand surging though; the collapse of the cavernous husk, and a flash of red as someone reached out to pull it free. 

Still, it is not enough. Under them, the ground splinters as the hole threatens to widen.

It breathes in, and sinks roots deep into the firmament once more. Structure, it thinks. A palace of white and silver and black metal, all of it supported over an abyss by a silvering tree. Its legs vanish into the network of roots as it binds the ground beneath them.

Speaking hurts. It doesn't know what it's supposed to sound like here, when there isn't a god making the noises for you. "Remember," it forces out. 

Thankfully, the Hornet understands. "Everyone you met. Everyone you helped," she calls, over the voice of the Void. "It was not for nothing. Don't let it be for nothing!"

Somewhere in the dark, a hand squeezes back, feebly.

It knows how it feels, to be that tired. It squeezes back. "Supposed to be hollow. But - don't think we ever are," it says. Pain spasms in its throat, the burns seizing, and it croaks. "You bear the Brand. You keep your horns. You remember where you were born."

They're both there in the black egg, buried under layers of the dead. They died, and they were remade. Root and Wyrm and Void.

An insubstantial hand reaches between it and the Hornet. It does not recognize the bug, with its two masks, or the memory that strikes a chord within its sibling; nor does it know the next, or the one after, who inexplicably extends a mining pick into the Void with a trembling expression. But it recognizes the ones from the village above. "What have you learned?" a warrior asks, one of three identical bugs, their eyes alight despite the dark. "How have you grown?"

All of them dreaming. All of them dying.

"You have the will," the Hornet says. "It's time to wake up."

In a single, fluid, screaming rush, all of the Void condenses. A single point of absolute darkness. It's like staring into a hole in reality, impossibly black.

The Knight pushes back its pale mask and swallows it, almost politely, with a terrible mouth. The Hornet's claws clamp down on the Knight's hand as it hovers before them, its tiny body so very familiar. For a moment it vibrates under their hands as the roiling forces within threaten to burst free. Its sibling could not contain the Void ascendant before - but before, it did not realize it had to.

Now, it curls up and forces itself to digest. Its smooth, horned head rattles the longest; its dark carapace goes rigid, hardening, the Void stuff of its substance solidifying into something strong enough.

When it lands on its feet with a tap and looks up, luminous white eyes stare back at them. It looks around in tiny, darting glances, taking in every face. The King's Brand etched on its forehead has gone dark.

It considers releasing its sibling's hand for another to take up. The memory that resonates between them is not a happy or a proud one. As though sensing the thought - as an awakened dreamer might, the Knight's prowess in this realm far beyond theirs - the Knight squeezes its hand again.

Without warning, the Knight hiccups. A tiny blot of Void pops out from behind its mask. Pale eyes narrow in faint irritation, the Knight sucks the bubble back in. 

Then, and only then, does it attempt to rise - and realizes they are all standing on a lacework of white, gleaming roots. The world around them is lit with soft light, filtering through the pale grey clouds.

-

It opens its eyes. 

The temple of the black egg lies in ruins. Immense claws tore up the ceiling in the Void's writhing throes. It and the Hornet kneel as close to the central chasm as they can. The hole plunges, impossibly deep. The black ink stains are already faded, flaking down into the city below.

They are still holding the Knight's hands. All of their garments are dyed pitch black from kneeling in the tide.

The Hornet plucks at her cloak, and sighs. 

Slow, uncertain, the Knight gives a tiny, voiceless huff of laughter. 

Its hand slips from the Knight's as it closes its eyes and falls to the ground.

-

In the cliffs above Dirtmouth, green things are growing.

For the first time in an age, there is no wind to tear up dust and soil to fill the sky with a dull, perpetual haze. The dust is slow to settle, the topsoil eroded thin, but there is enough to sink roots into and hold it there, in the hopes that it might stay. The winds have carried seeds from distant places, but they could not sprout before. It brings the ones that want it water, and watches what blooms.

Some of the lumaflies survived, but not all. But there is light here now, and every few days another wayward bug stumbles in from the wastes, blinking in the light of day. It sends them on their way with a sketched map, so they can find their way home. The passages between the cliffs and the growing village are clear. Occasionally something larger comes hunting, and it retrieves its battered nail from the covered entrance of its hollowed home to settle matters.

(The Hornet and the Knight took it down to the crying city, after. There is a statue there it never saw - of itself, both hands folded over its nail, close to its chest. Placed there by the King, before he and his Palace vanished into the dream and faded away.

It can never ask him what it meant. If it was a lie, or a wish, or an apology. It will never see him again. The ache will never truly fade.)

But mostly, it is quiet. Peaceful. A faint breeze stirs the leaves and fragile blossoms. The light never burns its eyes when it looks up. It stayed a while in the village below, huddled and overwhelmed by the sound of so many voices, before the Knight took its hand and showed it a quiet place. Always, before the peaceful solitude can become loneliness, the Knight and the Hornet who is also the King come to visit. It stirs different leaves and berries into hot water for them to drink, and they sit companionably on the edge of the cliff that overlooks the village, basking in the warm sunlight. The Hornet shakes back her new red cloak to fan out her narrow wings, and the Knight tips its head to lean against its remaining arm.

(The Knight always knows when it grows lonely. Its bright eyes find it in dreams, where they can speak. They are the only two who remain – it has no greater awareness of the abyss below, or the winds above. The Void is sealed.)

It doesn't have a name yet. One day, it will choose. 

**Author's Note:**

> [Time](http://inkskinned.com/post/119126174048/she-would-have-swallowed-the-sun-to-make-you-warm) to [cite](https://www.homestuck.com/story/82) [some](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F157geaXp_w) [sources](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45292/hymn-to-proserpine-after-the-proclamation-in-rome-of-the-christian-faith), [babes](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tz82xbLvK_k).
> 
>  
> 
> Hornet: Hey bro, what do you want to eat?  
> The Void: **The Souls Of The Innocent.**  
>  The Knight: ...A bagel.  
> The Void: **NOOOO -**  
>  The Old Vessel: Two bagels.
> 
>  
> 
> sunderedstar.tumblr.com


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